R9 290X vs GTX Titan vs GTX 780 - Titan Killer Benchmarks - Showdown

**The Radeon R9 290x: A Comprehensive Review**

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### **Introduction**

Welcome to NCX Tech Tips, where we delve into the latest in technology and hardware. Today, we're focusing on the Radeon R9 290x, a card that has been dubbed the "Titan Killer" more times than any other graphics card. This title is well-earned, as the Titan has long stood alone at the top of GPU performance charts. However, does the R9 290x live up to its hype? Let's explore this in detail.

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### **Key Features and Architecture**

The Radeon R9 290x is built on AMD's GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture, which has been a cornerstone for AMD GPUs across various platforms. This same architecture powers the Wii U, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, solidifying its importance in modern gaming technology.

One of the standout features of the R9 290x is its compatibility with Mantle, a new API developed by AMD. Mantle aims to overcome limitations posed by DirectX and OpenGL, offering developers greater flexibility in handling draw calls. This innovation makes the R9 290x an excellent choice for next-gen gaming experiences.

The card boasts a massive six-billion-transistor GPU, clocked at 1 GHz, and features 4 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 512-bit interface. These specifications are optimized for 4K gaming, where the R9 290x truly shines. While its full potential is unlocked at 2.5K or higher resolutions, the steady decline in 4K monitor prices makes this card a future-proof investment.

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### **Performance Benchmarks**

When comparing the R9 290x to its competitors, such as the GTX Titan and GTX 780, it's clear that AMD has created a formidable contender. In stock configurations, the R9 290x holds its own against these high-end cards.

However, overclocking reveals different results. While the 780 often edges out the 290x in such scenarios, the latter remains a strong competitor when run at stock settings. Considering its price point of around $550, the R9 290x offers excellent value for gamers seeking top-tier performance without breaking the bank.

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### **Power Consumption and Efficiency**

In terms of power consumption, the R9 290x doesn't claim any awards. At idle, it consumes about 10 watts more than both the Titan and GTX 780. However, this is still impressive when compared to older generations lacking AMD's ZeroCore technology.

Under load, the R9 290x uses approximately 60W more than the Titan and 70W more than the 780. Despite these figures, its efficiency at higher resolutions makes it a viable option for 4K gaming enthusiasts.

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### **Cooling Options: Quiet Mode vs Uber Mode**

The R9 290x offers two cooling modes to suit different preferences:

1. **Quiet Mode:** Caps fan speeds at 40%, resulting in a minor performance hit of about 5%. The sound level is still noticeable, likened to a hairdryer on a low setting.

2. **Uber Mode:** Sets fan speeds at 55%, offering better cooling and higher performance but with increased noise levels.

While both modes generate more noise than NVIDIA competitors, the R9 290x compensates with its competitive pricing and future-proof capabilities.

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### **Future Prospects**

AMD's focus on 4K gaming is evident in the R9 290x. Upcoming firmware updates promise to enhance the 4K experience by seamlessly detecting tiled monitors, making high-resolution gaming more accessible as prices drop.

The release of non-reference cards with improved cooling solutions and power designs could further solidify the R9 290x's position in the market. These developments are eagerly awaited by enthusiasts.

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### **Conclusion**

The Radeon R9 290x is a compelling option for gamers seeking high performance at an affordable price. While it may not outperform the GTX Titan or GTX 780 in every scenario, its efficiency at 4K and competitive pricing make it a strong contender.

The choice between the R9 290x and its competitors boils down to priorities: settle for top-tier performance at a lower cost, or opt for quieter, more refined alternatives like the Titan or 780.

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### **Subscribe for More Tech Tips**

Don't forget to subscribe to NCX Tech Tips for more in-depth reviews and comparisons. We'd love to hear your thoughts on whether the R9 290x is worth the investment or if you prefer quieter, premium options like the Titan. Drop your comments below and stay tuned for more tech insights!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to ncx Tech tips so we're here with the radon R9 290x it's been called the Titan killer more times than I think any other card has ever been called the Titan killer and the reason for that is that the Titan has pretty much stood alone a top the GPU performance charts I'm probably out of the frame don't worry about it see I'm going to move this right back down I'm going totally troll you there uh for since it was released there was nothing that was even close so is the R9 290x everything it's been hyped up to be or is it more or is it less or is it a rabbit oh my God it's a rabbit you'll have to put a rabbit in there for that to make sense so let's have a look at the contestants today up first is the GTX Titan A1 th000 graphics card that some people were buying even though it didn't make necessarily a ton of sense but that might change even more over the next little while here 780ti has been announced but it's not here yet CU it's not here yet our next contestant is gtx780 around a $650 graphics card looks sexy performs great nearly as good as the Titan the only other graphics card that was really in the same realm in terms of performance and finally the newcomer the 290x so there's a lot of stuff to say about this card it's still based on the same gcn architecture as the last gen 7000 series so that is to say it is compatible with mantle which is one of the big talking points about gcn given that AMD owns the architecture inside the Wii U the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 and then obviously on the PC they've got a fair number of graphic cards out there so mantle is a new way of programming games to run specifically on AMD gpus even better so it actually goes around the whole directex opengl limitations especially with respect to how many draw calls it can handle and gives devs more flexibility it is engineered for 4K so it has a massive six billion transistor GPU in there that is clocked it up to 1 GHz it has 4 gigs of RAM on a 512 bit memory interface which means massive memory bandwidth optimized for 4K gaming so it doesn't even really start to show its muscle until you get up to around 2 and 1/2k gaming but the good news is that 2 and 1/2k monitors are coming down in price all the time you may have noticed physically there's a 16x pcie gen 3 connector and no Crossfire connectors Crossfire is now handled over the PCI Express Bus and AMD has tested this down to two cards running at pcie adex Gen 2 and found that there is no performance difference and as alluded to by PC pers article about 290x Crossfire um it looks like there might actually be some improvements with respect effect to frame latencies with the new implementation so that is extremely exciting true audio is also present on this car just like the 260x so that is dedicated hardware for audio processing and powertune has been updated to account not only for power consumption voltage and clock speed but also temperature now so the card comes to you locked in at running at 95° and squeezing as much performance out of itself as possible at that temperature the good news it is fully customizable just like GPU boost 2.0 is so you can have the card run at whatever temperature you want you'll just might have to compromise on Acoustics or on performance in order to get there so now let's talk numbers in terms of power consumption the 290x doesn't really win any awards here at idle and underload it runs about you know 10 watts higher than both Titan and GTX 780 at Idol but that's still pretty darn good especially if you go back a couple Generations before they implemented zeroc core which basically allows the card to turn itself mostly off when the systems idling and then under load we're looking at around 60° more power consumption than a Titan and around 70° more than a GTX 780 next up is game Benchmark so I'm going to let you guys check this out and I'm going to talk a little bit about the methodology here so unlike when I ran my own tests on my own channel NC opted to run the cards in stock configurations so what you'll probably notice is that the 29x does indeed seem to hold up to maybe not necessarily Titan killer expectations but it does meet the expectation if you were expecting a Titan competitor and when you consider the price of this card I hadn't talked about that yet of around $550 it starts to look very very compelling now when I ran my own numbers we run every card overclocked and our 290x wasn't a great overclocker it actually wasn't that bad but it wasn't great and we found that 780 did tend to pull ahead when you're overclocking not everyone overclocks their Hardware though so you have to see things from both perspectives and 290x is a formidable competitor when you look at it running in stock configuration and when you consider that it is less expensive than the GTX Titan and less expensive than the GTX 780 that it competes against the other thing to note is that 290x doesn't really stretch its legs until you get to HD Plus resolutions particularly 4K AMD has a new innovation that allows 4K monitors that are more like to tiled monitors together side by side such as a susus 4k monitor to be automatically detected with a future standard so there will be new firmwares and all that kind of stuff that will make the whole 4K display experience quite a bit more seamless as they come down in price and as more people buy them so the only thing that's really left is aside from FPS what is the gaming experience like with the card well it does run hot but of course you can adjust that and it does run quite loud now there's two switches you can either run in quiet mode which caps the fan at 40% or Uber mode which caps the fan at 55% but both of them are noticeably louder than gtx780 and GTX Titan it should be noted that our benchmarks here were run in Uber mode and you'll be looking at around a 5% hit in performance if you do step down to quiet mode in terms of how noticeable the difference in audio levels was uh wheel's take on it was that Uber mode was kind of hair dryish but I mean obviously not as bad as something like the uh you know 6990 which was really loud and then quiet mode was still a little bit haird dryish except maybe a hairdryer on like a very low setting either way it is louder than the competition but we can hope that it makes up for it in price and we can hope to see non reference cards with beefier power designs and better coolers coming very very soon and I'm really really personally excited to see what we see when those things arrive and we see them so thank you for checking out this this performance summary and Technology summary of the Radeon R9 290x don't forget to subscribe to ncx Tech tips for more videos like this from nc.com and I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments who's the winner the one that tops the performance charts at stock or the one that potentially delivers quieter performance and maybe a little bit more overclocking headro if you're willing to tune things yourselfwelcome to ncx Tech tips so we're here with the radon R9 290x it's been called the Titan killer more times than I think any other card has ever been called the Titan killer and the reason for that is that the Titan has pretty much stood alone a top the GPU performance charts I'm probably out of the frame don't worry about it see I'm going to move this right back down I'm going totally troll you there uh for since it was released there was nothing that was even close so is the R9 290x everything it's been hyped up to be or is it more or is it less or is it a rabbit oh my God it's a rabbit you'll have to put a rabbit in there for that to make sense so let's have a look at the contestants today up first is the GTX Titan A1 th000 graphics card that some people were buying even though it didn't make necessarily a ton of sense but that might change even more over the next little while here 780ti has been announced but it's not here yet CU it's not here yet our next contestant is gtx780 around a $650 graphics card looks sexy performs great nearly as good as the Titan the only other graphics card that was really in the same realm in terms of performance and finally the newcomer the 290x so there's a lot of stuff to say about this card it's still based on the same gcn architecture as the last gen 7000 series so that is to say it is compatible with mantle which is one of the big talking points about gcn given that AMD owns the architecture inside the Wii U the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 and then obviously on the PC they've got a fair number of graphic cards out there so mantle is a new way of programming games to run specifically on AMD gpus even better so it actually goes around the whole directex opengl limitations especially with respect to how many draw calls it can handle and gives devs more flexibility it is engineered for 4K so it has a massive six billion transistor GPU in there that is clocked it up to 1 GHz it has 4 gigs of RAM on a 512 bit memory interface which means massive memory bandwidth optimized for 4K gaming so it doesn't even really start to show its muscle until you get up to around 2 and 1/2k gaming but the good news is that 2 and 1/2k monitors are coming down in price all the time you may have noticed physically there's a 16x pcie gen 3 connector and no Crossfire connectors Crossfire is now handled over the PCI Express Bus and AMD has tested this down to two cards running at pcie adex Gen 2 and found that there is no performance difference and as alluded to by PC pers article about 290x Crossfire um it looks like there might actually be some improvements with respect effect to frame latencies with the new implementation so that is extremely exciting true audio is also present on this car just like the 260x so that is dedicated hardware for audio processing and powertune has been updated to account not only for power consumption voltage and clock speed but also temperature now so the card comes to you locked in at running at 95° and squeezing as much performance out of itself as possible at that temperature the good news it is fully customizable just like GPU boost 2.0 is so you can have the card run at whatever temperature you want you'll just might have to compromise on Acoustics or on performance in order to get there so now let's talk numbers in terms of power consumption the 290x doesn't really win any awards here at idle and underload it runs about you know 10 watts higher than both Titan and GTX 780 at Idol but that's still pretty darn good especially if you go back a couple Generations before they implemented zeroc core which basically allows the card to turn itself mostly off when the systems idling and then under load we're looking at around 60° more power consumption than a Titan and around 70° more than a GTX 780 next up is game Benchmark so I'm going to let you guys check this out and I'm going to talk a little bit about the methodology here so unlike when I ran my own tests on my own channel NC opted to run the cards in stock configurations so what you'll probably notice is that the 29x does indeed seem to hold up to maybe not necessarily Titan killer expectations but it does meet the expectation if you were expecting a Titan competitor and when you consider the price of this card I hadn't talked about that yet of around $550 it starts to look very very compelling now when I ran my own numbers we run every card overclocked and our 290x wasn't a great overclocker it actually wasn't that bad but it wasn't great and we found that 780 did tend to pull ahead when you're overclocking not everyone overclocks their Hardware though so you have to see things from both perspectives and 290x is a formidable competitor when you look at it running in stock configuration and when you consider that it is less expensive than the GTX Titan and less expensive than the GTX 780 that it competes against the other thing to note is that 290x doesn't really stretch its legs until you get to HD Plus resolutions particularly 4K AMD has a new innovation that allows 4K monitors that are more like to tiled monitors together side by side such as a susus 4k monitor to be automatically detected with a future standard so there will be new firmwares and all that kind of stuff that will make the whole 4K display experience quite a bit more seamless as they come down in price and as more people buy them so the only thing that's really left is aside from FPS what is the gaming experience like with the card well it does run hot but of course you can adjust that and it does run quite loud now there's two switches you can either run in quiet mode which caps the fan at 40% or Uber mode which caps the fan at 55% but both of them are noticeably louder than gtx780 and GTX Titan it should be noted that our benchmarks here were run in Uber mode and you'll be looking at around a 5% hit in performance if you do step down to quiet mode in terms of how noticeable the difference in audio levels was uh wheel's take on it was that Uber mode was kind of hair dryish but I mean obviously not as bad as something like the uh you know 6990 which was really loud and then quiet mode was still a little bit haird dryish except maybe a hairdryer on like a very low setting either way it is louder than the competition but we can hope that it makes up for it in price and we can hope to see non reference cards with beefier power designs and better coolers coming very very soon and I'm really really personally excited to see what we see when those things arrive and we see them so thank you for checking out this this performance summary and Technology summary of the Radeon R9 290x don't forget to subscribe to ncx Tech tips for more videos like this from nc.com and I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments who's the winner the one that tops the performance charts at stock or the one that potentially delivers quieter performance and maybe a little bit more overclocking headro if you're willing to tune things yourself\n"